Symbian^3 officially announced, previewed on video
The time has finally come for us to see Symbian's milestone shift toward finger-friendly operation in motion. Firstly, to allay any fears that it'd lack all the modern amenities, we'll note that kinetic scrolling, swiping, and pinch-to-zoom are all present and accounted for, while a "visual multi-tasking" option allows you to see the open applications in an interface not a million miles away from the Pre's card implementation. Customization is also a big deal in the new UI, with multiple Home Screen pages available, accompanied by a litany of widgets you can add and manage. The media player application looks like a homage (read: copy) of Apple's Cover Flow UI, right down to the album covers flipping around to reveal the track listing. We're not complaining, we consider that a very intelligent and pleasing way to browse through music. Go check out the moving picture show after the break.























Isnt that pinch to zoom patented by apple?! hmmm..and the coverflow. But it is great to see this extreme makeover of all popular mobile Oses, they now look sooo good. All thanks to iPhone OS, it started it all.:)
MENUs?! They must be kidding!
As this is Symbian I'm pretty sure you can make the "skin" of the UI whatever you like, change the colours, gradients... FONTS. Just get over it.
Also for those who grave for Nokia Android phones: Why? Isn't those 50 or so HTC's, Samsungs, LG's, Motorollators enough? What is there to be gained by Nokia Android? Symbian might even be a better mobile OS than Android, and if there needs to be an new UI why to build it on some completely new OS other than what you own yourself, have been developing for 10 years and have couple of hundred millions devices sold already?
It would take Google about 1 second to ditch Android if it had shipped 200 million Symbian devices.
The OS will continue to suck as long as it's menu based. It's still S60v3 with some added eye-candy and gestures!
Nokia needs a total OS overhaul to pull me away from my iPhone.
I think I might have changed my mind about MeeGo, although I suppose we'll wait and see. I love the UI here, and Nokia's cameras are my favorite, so unless someone else comes out with something more serious than Nokia's offerings I'm still sticking with them, no matter the OS.
OMG Nokia just drop the old symbian OS ( i know this s3 is better but it still not what we want!)and use what everyone really wants which is as close to possible to a computer os as possible on a phone IE maemo (until someone does something closer)we want freedom not jailbreaking all the time,i love the n900 for freedom to install os and programs( i know some of the os are slow BUT its a start!)
@n1hmrd
Finally someone with some balls to say it. Maemo is so much better than Symbian. Symbian is a pathetic old washed up attempt to compete with windows mobile. I say it needs to go. Fast.
I guess I'll have to wait until Symbian^4 for Nokia to finally lose the double stacked menu toolbar at the bottom of practically every screen. Things look good. That web browser needs a better UI though.
better... still, convert those 2 battery and signal "horns" into horizontal ones and gain some screen real estate. that in itself will make the user interface look new...
Nokia is back in the game....
Sweet, now why couldn't they have done this LAST year for the release of s60v5? There is nothing new and innovative here, they are still just trying to catch up to the UI the FIRST GENERATION iPhone offered us in 2007!! I'm not an apple fanboy at all but FFS nokia, lets see something NEW...I'm sick of the same old UI's -- cover flow copy, copying apple's kinetic scrolling, HTC's widgets...LETS SEE SOMETHING NEW AND INNOVATIVE NOT JUST COPY OFF EVERYONE ELSE!
Looks.....okay.
We'll have to wait and see. Remember all those jazzy videos of the N97 last year prior to release? And then you picked up the device and it was all kinds of busted?
Yeah. So let's wait and see, but honestly this is where Symbian should have been *three years ago*.
Yeah, yeah, they have 50% market share selling dumb-phones with a T9 keypad to emerging markets. That's super and all, but LG and Samsung and Chinese brands are battling in those markets as well. That market share number is going to start sliding before long.
Isn't this exactly what people have been asking for? The superior quality and tech specs of a Nokia combined with the i candy of the competitors? Here it is!
@mja
What, you mean the tech specs of the N97 and the Mini? ARM 11 400 MHz processors and 128 MB of RAM (30 MB free after boot-up)? No graphics accelerator?
Those superior tech specs?
It's basically buit from S60V5. Nokia should call it S60V7. :p
It's similar to my N97, but with little improvements here and there.
Nokia, please release the power of S60V5 by adding more video playback supports. If supporting different fomat is not an option, please at least make the resume, resize working properly. Don't waste the beautiful LCD it has.
Also, please make it possible to read differnet languages without mocking around with firmwares. ppl need different languages for their MP3 but still need to stick to different regions of hardware. Why is it so difficult to understand?
@ecsw "Why is it so difficult to understand?"
I could not make any sense of your message, but I'm not a native English speaker so maybe it's just me.
Most users don't need other languages than their own region, and if you do you can probably just change the product code and install another region FW. I've done it couple of times.
@Nrde
Change product code means mocking around with firmware/phone.
2nd, change product code to different region meaning you will lose one of the WCDMA band. For example, N97 sold in North American is RM-507. If you need Asian characters, you need product code from RM-505. Once you do that, you lose WCDMA 850 band and 900 is gone becasue RM507 does not have hardware for WCDMA 900.
You end up with a cripple phone if you change product code.
The only way to do is it to use JAF with different language pack which I know how to do after hours of reading.
You will be suprised how many people need this. Search "n97 language pack" and you will see many people looking for solutions.
If Apple can make their iPhone with many of languages out of the box, I am sure Nokia can too.
@ecsw
You can check how many different regional and language versions Nokia is already supporting for their devices. I bet they have hundreds of times more versions of FW than Apple does. Maybe it would be trivial to change how the device language is handled, or maybe there's a reason why it's not easy.
@Nrde
I understand that Nokia must have supported in total more firmware than iPhone/Apple. But at least give out the option to customers to change/add different language pack without going through such a hassle. For example, give customer option to add on language if they really need it from Nokia Firmware update rather than telling customer "if you need the language for that region, you have to buy it there instead!".
S60V3 can at least be tricked with uni-code fonts saved on memory card to read different languages, but it was taken out from S60V5.
IMO, that's 1 step back.
Nokia made Symbian an open system is on the right direction again and I hope it's not too late...
i have always been impressed with the quality/durability of Nokia phones, but they need to step it up with the overall design and affordable availability of high end phones in the US market.
If their moving to a very interactive touch design such as this, I would think a non-keyboard very thin capacitive phone would make sense. The near 20mm thick N900 is simply not going to cut it, sorry. I was done having a 'brick' in my pocket when I got rid of my my Nokia 5110